A couple months back, I ran across The Last Breakfast, a work of art by Brian Stuckey repopulating da Vinci’s Last Supper with breakfast cereal mascots. It’s clever and very well done. Go take a look.

The Last Breakfast by Brian Stuckey, missing a figure.

Only something was missing. The layout and positioning of the figures in da Vinci’s work is pretty well-known: the twelve apostles are broken into groups of three. But when I first saw Last Breakfast, someone was missing, as you can see in this screen capture from the image as it appeared on the website at the time.

As it happens, the missing figure is often alleged to be Mary Magdalene. At the time, I thought it was an interesting and seemingly intentional omission, given there was a gap between figures too wide to fit in as normal spacing. Being a bit of a conspiracy fan, I wondered if it was some kind of secret message or commentary on the reading of secret messages by the artist.

I wrote Brian about the missing figure and he replied:

you will see that Boo Berry is supposed to be in the place of Mary Magdalene (or John depending on who you ask). When I sculpted this I wanted boo berry to be translucent, since he’s a ghost, so I photographed him separately so I could reduce his opacity when I tweaked the final image. It seems I forgot to flatten the image in photoshop before I threw it onto my website. My blog, strangely has always had the correct image (http://sculptwerks.blogspot.com/). Sorry if I’ve taken away some of the mystery!

So that wrapped that up, but I did learn about an intentional Easter egg: “The only thing I hid in this image is Count Chocula is the only one with a cup of blood instead of orange juice or milk.”